


A victim in that lonely dell

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dumping-ground for Homestuck shortfic that first saw the light of day on my tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cartography

“C.S. Lewis couldn’t find his own ass if supplied with a single-continent fantasy map to the same,” Rose said to the wall. From the side her face was largely concealed by her hood; when she sipped her “wodka” it was as if a comma-shaped orange windsock were inhaling clear liquor. 

“I don’t know who that is,” said Kanaya. She was fidgeting, she knew. She wanted to take the glass. She wanted to take Rose’s hand and flatten it against the tabletop. 

“But you would like him,” said Rose. “I feel sure of it. Had you your choice of the human novel, you would swing round to Narnia like a compass needle with a magnetic attraction to glorified closets. And that is— that is  _exactly_  why—”

“I was perfectly successful in my initial efforts to locate your posterior,” said Kanaya, defensively. “It’s on top of your prongs.”

“Ah,” said Rose, waving an unsteady finger, “ _but on which side_?” 

Kanaya did reach for the drink, then. She was very fast these days, and stronger than she was fast, but she was brighter even than that; and almost instinctively Rose flinched from the flaring movement of her arm. Rose dropped the glass, or threw it. It hit some hard surface with a crack and an expanding clatter, the sound of its disintegration like birds. “Don’t,” Rose said, so Kanaya didn’t, didn’t look or rise to clean the glitter from the blast zone, only put her hand back in her lap and kissed Rose’s ear through the cloth of her cowl. 

“What’s a Narnia?” she asked. 

Rose’s shoulder lifted, once. “A place where beasts can speak,” she said. She raised her thumb to touch Kanaya’s jaws.


	2. Fruit Bat

Kanaya is perching on top of the wardrobe when Rose gets back to their rooms.

“Hey there, Dracula,” says Rose, to no immediate answer. Kanaya has her knees spread wide, her feet dangling, her narrow face white and pensive under the today-orderly arrangement of her curls. Her skirt is bunched around her hips. Her horns cast a forked shadow on the wall. Rose reaches up to grab one naked ankle, and Kanaya recoils, bringing her knee up to tuck under her chin. She’s not glowing, but there is no trace in her of her premortem complexion: in the time since Porrim taught her to walk the line between undead and  _un_ dead, she has been exploring gradation, Rose understands. Today her skin is papery as an edict.

Rose would like to be able to say she knows better than to push, but in the time since her own death she has become a bad liar. She doesn’t know what to do about Kanaya’s unnegotiable silence, and that’s the long and short of it. She walks across the room to the table and sits down to work.

_The turtles tell a story_ , she writes,  _about a girl who couldn't see, though she had three mismatched eyes…_

There is a thud from behind her, as of a light ungraceful landing. She doesn’t have time to turn in her seat before Kanaya is at her side, drawing her face forcibly towards herself. Rose looks up from Kanaya’s nacreous collarbones— up the length of her neck to meet dry yellow eyes, and then Kanaya’s face is too close to look at. “Excuse me,” says Rose. Kanaya kisses her without excuse, her mouth deft and expressive, her fingertips holing Rose’s sore cheeks. Rose can still feel the pen in her own hand, the density of the pages under her fist, beyond the reach of her peripheral vision but not forever lost. Kanaya tilts her head and Rose tilts a little after, not meaning to, not even wanting to— she’s ruining this embrace, she thinks, when the side of her nose brushes a flexible vampiric nostril— but Kanaya’s tongue swipes sweetly up the inside of her lip and Rose is lost beyond hope of choreography. 

She pats Kanaya’s boob. “Hmmmmm,” hums Kanaya, low in her throat. 


	3. The Two-Tailed Heart

What’s the difference between a dead boy’s eye and a boy’s dead eye? He sometimes sees things in the hollow left half of his sight, a burst of petunia-color, or other nameless flowers: what might have been snapdragons, without teeth. Human things, says Aradia, with interest. She runs a quick palm down the side of his face, her thumb strobing in and out of his vision, the act and nearness of her uncertain in a way he would have been incapable to imagine while living. He always used to know what was happening to him, with prophecy taking the place of consent. Now he says Stop and she lowers her hand slowly to his knee, takes his hand and kisses the two foremost knuckles, the mustard veins. “What is the deal,” he asks, “why do I still have blood, do I have a pump in here? A waste that big?” It’s strange how her mouth drags sideways against the bone core of each finger, her eyes trained on him from beneath thick painted lashes. The gleam of them like pearls in a net. 

So, they go sight-seeing. Through void, and also down his back, his T-shirt coming off with unceremonious speed and her tapping the stairway of his spine. He bends forward, feeling the distance between arched scapulas spread, and she says, “I think it skips every other beat. Oh, Sollux, you never did know when to let a schtick go.”

He likes the way she says his name: with pity. “Don’t even try to tell me you think that’s not cool. I’m post-mortem on timeshare. What’s not awesome about that?”

In the small of his back, her hand spreads like a smile. “All right,” she says. She evades giving answers, asshole fairy style, and sometimes flickers when she hears a smart guess. Months ago they found a bubble which held his whole hivestem, all the respiteblocks empty but his own, his pre-game corpse submersed too deep in a dream of rigor mortis to be roused; they went instead to his upstairs neighbor, who left behind a pocked-stone room, a flickering green husktop-screen, a slab. No coon—what was this, he thought, a gaming hideout? Aradia took off her wings. This not a thing he’d known that she could do. The hoodie came with, leaving her in a grey moirailbeater, her shoulders bare and strong. He wanted to look a little at the lightly muscled curve of her upper arm, limned in lime by the untouchable computer, but that wasn’t her idea at all: she nodded to the wings. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. He wasn’t. But it was weird, to stroke shitty tissue-paper toys, and feel so grateful. They crinkled on the frame. Between the glow and the gloom they had grown almost blue, the red muting to mazarine now that it did not touch her. He thinks of it when she kneels at his foot, and when she presses one flaring ear against his heart, from behind. That gentleness of descent, or just gradation. Each moment’s shade the more finely divided from itself.


	4. Cameos for Calliope

**1\. Roxy**

It’s not so bad when it starts out. 

Roxy is solicitous and unthinkingly kind: her manner, when you meet in the flesh, in many ways defies expectation, but those traits persist. (And how strange, to carry on a conversation neither remotely or over the course of years, with messages scrawled on the wall and secret kings and surprisingly severable patellas.) She speaks with slow deliberation, her mouth more clumsy than her fingers, unused to use. She tells you you are pretty, you  _are—_ a voice that could be forceful but instead shades to desperate. What she calls ‘your being stubborn as a horse’s butt’ makes her rake her thick fingers through her curls, her square fingertips dragging the strange hair back from skin.

Her scalp fascinates you. So vulnerable, so crumbling-pink beneath the cornsilk mass, where all the rest of her is deeply browned. If you dug your fingertips into the curve of her skull, you could pull at the skin until it bared pinker bone. Humans are nested, interior, and yet at every level they remain themselves. If you were less envious, or more, you might seethe. But you are here and in any case your brother is dead. He has bequeathed you bulk and phantom pains and a very stupid coat, and though when you sleep you sometimes feel his corpse coincide with your bones, he will never occupy you again. 

Nor you him. You are always face to face with the world, these days, unenclosed. So yes, sometime soon you will ask Roxy to stop— to go, or to let you leave, or just to be a little silent. But for now, this absent while, you let the crawling irritant of her hopeless love worm into you. You think of tearing her from crotch to throat, not out of want but out of a kind of grief, nostalgia for some friendless heat that you are nonetheless glad to lose forever.

**2\. Caliborn**

At first you didn’t know who he was.

You were aware of him, remotely— another mind is a hard thing to miss, even when it obliterates you by its waking. You saw the footprints on the other side of the room, the accruing rot. But you donned the chain each night out of duty rather than fear, and you daydreamed about your mysterious brother, so reticent and inescapable. You imagined him serious, thoughtful, wry. A little younger and a little weaker than you. When eventually he began to respond to your smiling notes, it was barely coherent, his handwriting a scrambled mess, his punctuation everywhere or nowhere depending how you read the spray of ink. You could see, even then, that he was mocking you, but you thought it not meanspirited. Some of his jokes were halfway to funny.

Later of course you discovered how wrong you were. Later he killed you, by proxy (and mustn’t that have been a funny conversation— “I’D LIKE YOu. TO TAKE OuT. A BITCH”— god only knows what Jack Noir made of him). Later you spent all of his precious time running through the dark you’d never loved, its foaming depths. You remembered your misconceptions with shame and anger both.

And you were glad when, in the course of your wandering, you found versions of him who had never known you. Their eyes like eggs in their sockets, and they regarded you with hungry rage, with bottomless ambition; but you eluded them, all of them, you were swifter than all his failed ghosts. 

**3\. Jane**

You startle her.

Endlessly, and obviously. She looks at you when you speak and almost looks away, too baffled by the hollows of your profile to let her eyes rest on your cheekbone or jaw. It’s not repulsion, exactly— well, only. It’s rather that every time she glances away she forgets that you were ever more than text, or less than human. A remnant, you suppose, of sixteen years’ careful programming: her brain tender, plastic, both wounded and always able to heal itself. She believes so little. It’s possible she believes less every day. Sometimes she forgets her friends’ names, covers awkwardly with Ro-Lal and Di-Stri and even Ja-Eng, which sounds so much like her own damn name that she always touches her mouth after. They tolerate it like children who have never before been named out loud at all. You are not exactly an exception, but you take her aside anyway, too tired and uneasy to let her fall apart.

“Look at me,” you say. She protests, her voice riding high and nervous; protests the premise, protests the command. She looks at you. Beneath dark eyelids her eyes are still and broadly blue; the sun, rising, fires her fine black lashes— makes them a scarlet cage.


	5. What Did She Use To Transport Them Well I Don't Know Maybe That Little Red Crockercorp Gun

There’s a frozen silence after Jade disappears: her grandmother makes dots to herself, and the iguana watching from the woods draws a solemn circle in the glacially-enriched soil with its weird lizard forepaw, but neither of those really constitute an interruption. Karkat is starting to think they’re off the hook when Kanaya spins and bites him. 

"Aughhhhh," says Karkat, lifting one arm to shield his face and neck. Her mouth is already buried in the joinery of his shoulder; he accomplishes nothing except, maybe, hiding his expression from the uninterested Harley clone. A slap at Kanaya’s lowered head makes her rock a little, and she takes him with her when she staggers; they sway in place as if dancing, like Dave and Rose on the asteroid, when they both drank from cups garnished with tiny anti-weather contraptions and shuffled around the computer lab in one another’s arms. He can barely feel her teeth. Instead it’s like he’s getting drunk, and there’s a weight around his throat, pulling him down and down—her hand on the other side of his neck, cool and intensely strange when she hasn’t touched him in almost a sweep. The dismal puff of each fingertip, which he’d almost forgotten: their softness unbelievable after the skin-and-bone fingers and starved palms. But gravity, Terezi said, takes blood to the utmost ends of a corpse, and he thinks of his own valve pumping awful salt into her throat, her rearranged organs, and from there at last to her blackened toes. That is  _so weird_. She’s going to walk on him.

The noise it makes when she detaches is the pop you get unsealing a rubber cap. “Divine," she says, sounding like Rose after eating the olive off her umbrella—only because she’s Kanaya and has an actual brain, she also sounds a little suspicious. “What did you put on the ends of that trident?"

“ _ **.**_ ," says Jane, and zaps them both out of her sight. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aradia and three friends.

**1\. Vriska**

She visited you, just the once.

Quartz and melody did not become her. In the midst of all that cool-sheened clarity she was too orange, too bold; certainly too silent. She had her hair tucked down the back of her shirt, and her face was unfamiliarly naked, her neck all carven and pale. She did not attempt a smile. 

“Hey,” she said, and in a thousand crystal facets her mouth also moved. 

“Go away,” you said, you thought clearly; but she pretended not to hear. “I just wanted to say,” she said, more loudly, “that I kiiind of owe you one.” She looked expectant. She raised one hand as if to catch anything that you threw.

Maybe she was expecting you to disagree. You did, as it happens, disagree. “You owe me a lot,” you told her, and watched the frustration fill her flat eyes. 

“Yeah. Well. Since you so kindly turned me into a  _god_ , I just thought I’d ask if– there was anything I could do! For you. For old times’ sakes." 

You stared at her. It really was strange seeing her without the full wild mass of her curls to hedge in her expression, to shadow her brow; she looked both narrower and less diffuse, the set of her jaw on her neck clearly discernable, the line of her throat rigid. With the filters Zahhak installed in your eyes you could polarize her image or view her as a shadow of heat. You could make of her anything you wanted, and it would be justly irreparable.

"Go away,” you said again. She unfurled her wings in sudden shudderful movement, and they spread wide, blue, like ink flowing up the capillaries of a colorless sky. 

**2\. Sollux**

After the meteor has shrunk to a fluctuating speck, he turns to you. “So,” he says, all bravado, his strength so obviously fragile that you doubted he could break, “what next?‘ 

"I miss your teeth,” you tell him, hopelessly distracted by small things as you are: as you never were in death. His hair is surprisingly neat for someone who just exploded their own lungs with effort. His mouth, not so much; his gums are bloody and his tongue serial-grilled. And, yes, he recoils at the comment, but you match him easily, so that the distance between doesn’t change, maybe never changed at all.

“But not your lisp,” you say. “Because wow, what a silly way of talking.”

“Fuck you,” says Sollux, half a breath puffing soft off the fricative. His smile is full of holes, and you wonder if one day he will regrow just half his canines; but for now there’s only the dark curve of his relief, the single light of his one white eye. You grab his hand and it tenses in yours, his blunt thumb scrabbling for your wrist, the fat base of his palm shelflike and more than warm. 

**3\. Jade**

“I’m never dating a time player again,” Jade informs you, unprompted, after three swallows of what the alchemiter called the Pan-Galactic Ghost Master. “He tried to tell me he was breaking up  _because of his own fear of mortality_!”

For a moment you are silent. 

“Well,” you say at last. “If _that’s_ the issue…”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Rotary Movement](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9328154) by [abeillle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeillle/pseuds/abeillle)




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